Interview with Author Marie Phillips by Deb Smouse
Marie Phillips is the author of Gods Behaving Badly, which is to be released in the US December 10th (it was released in Marie’s native UK in August). She spent a little Q&A time with us recently…..
Tell the readers a little about your background.
I was born and brought up in London and I still live here now. My father is English and my mother is French, so I’ve always had that sense of being both and insider and an outsider in my own country. When I was a teenager I went to boarding school in the countryside in Dorset, in the south of England, and then I studied Anthropology at university in Cambridge and at post-grad level in Manchester. Before I started writing I worked as a TV researcher and did a stint at the BBC in Current Affairs, but while I was writing the book I worked in an independent bookshop, which was as stimulating in its own way - all that contact with people, and book-buyers are a passionate, varied and eccentric bunch. I should know, I’m one of them!
In what ways did your childhood influence you as a writer? As a person?
I had a very secure, loving home life and that gave me the confidence to develop my own creativity. At the same time I’m the youngest of four children and that made me want to get my voice heard! Unfortunately I wasn’t particularly happy at school, I was hard-working and smart but, while extrovert, I was socially anxious, and I ended up getting bullied.
It took a long time to get over that. I’m very happy now, but it’s a happiness that I’ve worked for. In my day-to-day life, the pain in my past is not something that I choose to dwell on, because my life now is such a joy, but in my writing I am interested in characters who don’t fit in, who maybe don’t understand the rules that everyone else is living by and are excluded because of that. I have a lot of sympathy for the outsider.
Most writers are avid readers. What authors do you read as a child? And today? Do you have a favorite author or book?
My favourite books when I was growing up were Little Women, the Little House series and the Anne of Green Gables series, and the Anastasia Krupnik series by Lois Lowry which is more contemporary of course. I loved reading about intelligent, creative, headstrong girls - girls who pushed boundaries, who were trying to figure out who they were within the expectations of their social context, and who suffered from, and overcame, crises in their own confidence. They are brilliant books about growing up, and I had that strange, wonderful feeling you sometimes get from a really good novel - that the author has perfectly understood you, and yet is writing without knowing you, perhaps before you were ever born.
“…I had that strange, wonderful feeling you sometimes get from a really good novel - that the author has perfectly understood you, and yet is writing without knowing you, perhaps before you were ever born.”
These days I don’t seek to identify so strongly with the characters I am reading about, I’m more looking to go on an imaginative journey. My favourite authors are Margaret Atwood, Peter Carey and Cormac MacCarthy. I think what they all have in common is a hugely evocative sense of place, a deep understanding of the inner lives of their characters, and a distinctive, transformative prose style.
Tell me about writing. Has it always been a passion? When is the first time you just knew you had written something that was good?
Until the age of eight, I was at a French primary school which didn’t encourage creative writing, and I still remember the first time I was asked to write a story at my new, English school. Until then I hadn’t actually realised that you could just make up your own stories. It was like a window opening. I’ve really been a writer since then - when I was young I was always writing stories and plays and the beginnings of novels which somehow never got finished, and newsletters full of family gossip. I even managed to complete one short novel in my teens, called ‘The Lone Bagpipe’ - a silly, fun pastiche of a Victorian melodrama. I remember the excitement when I first wrote on a typewriter aged about
ten, and how grown-up that made me feel, and I’m sure that’s why I write on a computer now, never long-hand. I think the first thing that I wrote that I knew was really good was a short story that was published in my school magazine when I was ten, called ‘Sir Totale De Zasta and the Holy Grail’. It was about a terrible Arthurian knight and his long- uffering horse. The real discovery was that the story was funny and made people laugh, and since then I’ve enjoyed writing humorous prose most of all.
Tell us about the process of getting your first book published….
It was a complete whirlwind. I had barely finished the book and had only shown it to a couple of people when my boss at the bookshop got a tip-off that Dan Franklin, an editor at Jonathan Cape, was interested in reading work by new writers. So I e-mailed him the first four chapters, and he replied the very next day asking for the rest. That was a Friday; on Monday morning he called me at work to make an offer. That evening I met him at his office, and I knew immediately that I had to sell the book to him. His enthusiasm was so warm and so genuine. Within a week we had done the deal. I don’t think that this is exactly a typical experience… more like a fairytale really!
Did you write in a diary as a kid? I know you’ve been a blogger…..Do you journal at all currently?
I had a number of attempts to keep a diary, some more successful than others. My longest period of journalling was as a teenager at boarding school, I suspect because it was the only kind of privacy that I got. Blogging is a bit different because you’re writing to be read. I have a complex relationship with blogging, sometimes I feel that it is too intimate, too exposing to share those inner thoughts with strangers, but when when I don’t do it for a while, I miss the feeling of being connected with the outside world, especially these days, as full-time writing can get a bit lonely. I suspect all writers have trouble negotiating that boundary between public and private, between what to share and what to keep to yourself. These days I keep my blog restricted to invited readers only because I ultimately felt too vulnerable writing about my life in the public domain. As a rule though, if you stick to telling the truth, you can’t go far wrong. People will not misunderstand you - but they might understand you all too well…
Do first drafts go to your agent, a friend, or who? What is your editing process?
Nobody sees a word of what I’m doing until I have completed a draft, I don’t even like talking about what I’m writing. At that early stage, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing, so it needs to stay fluid and uninfluenced by other people’s ideas. I might talk through certain issues with one or two writer friends if I get stuck, but that’s it. But then, once the first draft is down, I feel like I know what I’m trying to do and it’s time to figure out whether I have managed that successfully. And that’s something only a reader can tell you. So the draft goes out to my agent and to some trusted friends, with requests for detailed feedback. On the basis of that and my own thoughts, I write a second draft, which brings me closer to what I am trying to achieve. And then I repeat the process for a third draft, a fourth… maybe more… Gods Behaving Badly had about six!
Writing can be such a solitary career. How do friends fit in? Tell me about having made friends in the publishing industry?
I live alone and I work alone so it can get very lonely. I pack my evenings with socialising, I can’t stand for a whole day to go by without me seeing another human being! E-mail helps a lot, it can be too much of a distraction but on the whole I like the interruptions, being brought back into the world. But what helps most of all is having other friends in the same situation. Since getting my book deal, I’ve met a lot of other writers, through my publisher and my agent, and through launch parties and that kind of thing. It’s so good to be part of a network of other people working from home. When I start to feel isolated I’ll make a library date or suggest a working lunch… or a not particularly working lunch… or some kind of creative outing, like a visit to a gallery or a cinema trip, which might not be directly relevant to our work but which stimulates creative thinking in general.
I have also set up a couple of writing partnerships, to work on shorter-form pieces like comedy sketches, because the contact that you get from that kind of thing is so invigorating. The real risk is that if you disappear too far into your own head, you stop having anything interesting to say. I’m always looking for people and situations that
will being me out of myself.
Many of our readers are creative types, but struggle with the balance of devoting time to their creativity and simply living life. Walk us through a typical day in the life of Marie Phillips…
“It’s a great state of mind for creative thinking because it’s
a half dream-like state, so I find I have better access to my own subconscious.”
Well I am extremely lucky because I write full-time and because I don’t have other commitments such as a family to look after. So I live the ultimate selfish life! Typically I wake up around 9am and lie in bed for about half an hour, thinking about the writing that I am going to do that day. It’s a great state of mind for creative thinking because it’s
a half dream-like state, so I find I have better access to my own subconscious. Then I get up and go straight to the computer in my pyjamas and start work! Mid-morning I take a break for breakfast, and another to shower and dress, and then I stop for lunch at about 1.30. That’s four hours’ writing, and if it’s been a good day I’ll often not do any more work on my novel in the afternoon, but spend it on other things: general chores, administration, promotion, or, blissfully, reading. But if I haven’t achieved enough in the morning, I’ll resume work until 6pm. I aim to write about 1000 words a day and I do usually manage to achieve that goal, though there are a lot of days when I am researching or stuck or rewriting so the book doesn’t get done quite as fast as that sounds. I never work after 6pm because I don’t want my writing to take over my life, I think it’s really important to have a balance. So in the evenings I usually go out and meet friends, or host dinners at my house. Then I can never resist going online late at night to write e-mails, play scrabble and read some blogs. I always try to get to bed early but I never do; I usually make it into bed sometime after midnight and then read til 1am.
Where do you get your inspiration for your stories? And how did you come up with the concept of Gods Behaving Badly?
I get my ideas for stories from everyday life. Something will happen or someone will say something, and I’ll think: oh, that could be a story, and then I let it settle in my head. I often say that good ideas are sticky: other ideas stick to them. So if I have a good idea about a situation, suddenly it is stuck to another idea about a character, and another about a setting or a different bit of story and so on. They grow in clusters and soon I can’t think about anything else. A bad idea just doesn’t grow. It sits in my head by itself, generating nothing, and then eventually I just forget about it.
The idea for Gods Behaving Badly came when I was working on a TV documentary in a school. We were filming in a philosophy class, and the teacher started talking about the differences between the gods of the ancient world and the Judeo-Christian God. And I thought: what if they were right and we are wrong, and the greek gods really are the true gods? And I knew right then I’d had a brilliant idea for a book. It was an ultra-sticky idea! New thoughts about the different gods and what they might be doing now were popping up constantly.
Was there a particular one of the gods that you just liked? Anyone of them you didn’t like?
In terms of personal sympathy, I like Artemis: she’s like one of my childhood heroines, intelligent, headstrong, well-meaning but stuck on the outside. I have a lot of time for Artemis, though she’s arrogant like all of the gods; but she really does her best. It terms of being entertaining to write, Apollo was my favourite. I love all his pettinesses and tantrums and his unrepentant selfishness. He was only ever meant to be a small character but he completely took over the book.
There were no gods that I didn’t like. They were all fun to write, and aside from that, I think you have to like all your characters as you are writing them; at the moment you are acting for them, you have to identify with what they would do and why, even if on a personal level you abhor it.
And Alice & Neil? Tell me more about them.
Alice and Neil were the hardest characters to get right. For about the first two years of writing the book, they were two completely different people, called Doug and Claire. Doug and Claire were confident and successful and already a couple at the start of the book. I could never manage to get them right, to make them come alive and be as interesting as the gods. And then one day I suddenly realised the solution: I had to make them meek! So I came up with these two new, shy mortals and it really worked. The contrast between Alice and Neil’s quiet but heartfelt lives, and the gods’ cartoonish superficiality, made the book take off. It just didn’t work until then.
What is your favorite scene in God Behaving Badly?
My favourite scene in the book is when we meet Zeus. I knew early on that I wouldn’t be able to involve each of the gods equally in the story, but I wanted the reader to be able to get to know the minor characters through scenes that were almost mini stories in themselves. The mystery of what has happened to Zeus is drawn out for a long time,
and we only find out about halfway through the book. It’s a pivotal scene in terms of plot as well. I loved writing the character of Zeus and I think we find out so much about him in that one chapter, and there’s a lot of pathos in his interaction with Apollo, who we rarely get to see in any sympathetic light. Zeus represents all of our destinies: ageing, disease, death. It’s a funny chapter but I think frightening too, because it is true.
What one word of advice would you give other writers?
One word? Enjoy!
Can you tell us about your next project?
Not really! As it said, I like the keep my cards close to my chest when I’m early on in the writing process. But I am writing another novel, I’m really enjoying it, and though it’s similar in tone to Gods Behaving Badly, the content is completely different.
Share with us Five Favorites: Favorite Color / Favorite Beverage / Favorite Creation to Cook / Favorite Room in your House / Favorite Guilty Pleasure…..
- Favourite colour: green
Favourite beverage: a good French red wine - Favourite creation to cook: I can do about a thousand delicious things involving chicken Favourite room: my study - it’s such a luxury to have one
- Favourite guilty pleasure: downloading cheesy music onto my iPod and dancing alone around the house.
You can read the ATG Review of God’s Behaving Badly here.
(Photo: Thanks to Little, Brown & Company)
Deb Smouse is the Editor in Chief at All Things Girl. She’s is fast approaching 40…and spends her life fulfilling her roles as a consultant, mother, friend, reader, and writer. She loves to read…and appreciates the opportunity to talk with writers…. Find out more about Deb on our About Page.
